Reyes works on theories of semiotics, discourse, racialization, and postcoloniality. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis, her research examines how ideologies of language and race are formulated through spatiotemporal scales of communicative context in both the U.S. and the Philippines. She has conducted three main ethnographic studies: a four-year study of Southeast Asian American teenagers in an after-school videomaking project at an Asian American community arts organization in Philadelphia; a one-year study of Korean American fifth graders in an Asian American "cram school" in New York City; and a two-year study of Filipino college students and professors at a private university in Manila, Philippines. In this most recent work in the Philippines, Reyes examines conceptions of mixed race/language that link an elite social figure (a type of privileged mestizo youth called conyo)to an elite linguistic register (a form of Tagalog-English speech called conyo). She examines how anxieties about nation, modernity, race, and language are traceable through the circulation of the conyo figure/register on college campuses and across new media sites. She is also in the preliminary stages of researching Riot Grrrl punk feminist zine archives from the early 1990s.